


40-40 Vision

by ofshadowsandstars



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: 4x13: The Seam, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Spoilers, but not really, okay there's a little comfort, this is almost entirely pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 14:05:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18551296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofshadowsandstars/pseuds/ofshadowsandstars
Summary: A dead man's introspection on ways we say goodbye.Or, Penny 40 figures out why his friends threw what they did into the fire.





	40-40 Vision

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a hoe for symbolism, so I took a stab at the meanings behind everything thrown into the fire at the end of 4x13. I still can't think too hard about what happened without getting choked up, but I wanted to try and make something beautiful of the clusterfuck of pain we were left with.

**W. Adiyodi**

Normally, the Underworld branch of the Library didn’t let their employees read the books of people they knew while they were still alive, but once Penny made his peace with his situation and proved himself a model employee, they made an exception. One book, of his choosing, so long as it was one of his fellow questers. To nobody’s surprise, he picked Kady’s book. Reading about her fight to get magic back from the Library led him to Zelda’s book, and then to Fen’s. He’d been allowed to see them as part of his assessment for the newbie that was actually his boss, and the last of Quentin’s book had been speed-read on the way to the elevator.

 

**K. Orloff-Diaz**

From Kady’s book, he knew about the fireside vigil. He knew what it meant to her when she threw that book into the fire.

Quentin had quickly marked himself as someone who loved _Fillory and Further_. Penny, much as he had given him shit for it, had been able to see all the times and ways it had saved Quentin’s life. And when the truth of what Plover was had been revealed to Quentin, to all of them, it had been the beginning of the end for Quentin’s childhood hope. The thing he’d thought was good and true was marred by evil and tragedy and the very bullshit that had made life on Earth so dull and hopeless. But even knowing this, even in spite of this, Quentin had managed to make his own hope. To find his own way to look for the light at the end of the ever-befucked tunnel.

That first edition of _Fillory and Further,_  signed by the pedophilic rapist monster who wrote it, thrown into the flames, was the person that Kady had seen Quentin become. The way that he’d made himself the hero he’d needed.

[The next opportunity he had, Penny requested to see the pages of the vigil of everyone there. Just to _understand_ what it was that they loved about Q that they were saying goodbye to. Because Penny was already forgetting how to think about people as more than characters.]

 

**A. Quinn**

In the case of Alice, all Penny needed to read was that the mug was one that Quentin had repaired in front of her, after finally discovering his Discipline. Repair of small objects. _Like I helped it remember what it was before,_  he’d said. A fitting tribute, coming from the girl he’d made human again. The hole that had been torn in Alice by the loss of her brother, by having a family that she could never quite relate to, by being looked down on for standing above so many others…all of it had been healed, bit by bit, by knowing Quentin. He’d given her a hundred new ways to look at her world and understand her place in it. Penny could tell that her journey with magic wasn’t done, not by a longshot, but she never would’ve looked at it differently without him.

 

**W. Adiyodi (23)**

And then there was 23. The Penny that wasn’t Penny (— or was he? His book was available to 40 in the Underworld, even though he wasn’t even allowed to know if the Underworld _had_ the books of his other 38 lives.), throwing an egg with a face drawn onto it in Sharpie. Penny had read about the dragon debacle in Kady’s book, and knew she and Julia both had photos aplenty of Quentin and 23 sleeping with eggs in varyingly strange positions.

At first, Penny had figured that 23 had put in the egg because he hadn’t known Quentin 40 for very long, but his book said otherwise. The whole affair with Poppy and the dragon egg had been bizarre to the point of hilarious in retrospect. Under the influence of the egg magic, Quentin had been nurturing, zen, and yet wearing his heart on his sleeve. Back in timeline 23, Quentin had died, too, but he’d been brought back. Without his Shade. The Quentin that 23 had known had let go of such things as feeling things that were good and true. Quentin 40? Would sooner die than give up his heart, much as it had caused him pain.

 

**M. Hanson**

After 23 came Margo. Penny remembered watching her put the silver crown on Quentin’s head, calling him (quite accurately) The Moderately Socially Maladjusted. That moment, by the lake, full of sweet speeches and Eliot playing Swayze, had been one of the last days that Penny looked on with only fondness. Missing Kady and being worried about what Julia would do with the Beast had fallen away, if only for a few hours. They’d all needed it, and it had been beautiful.

Margo had always made herself seem beautiful and enticing but simultaneously cold and unapproachable. Penny had favored the latter demeanor, slipping in just enough cool, unaffected zen to have the same effect as Margo’s queen bee persona. Even if they’d never said it out loud, they both knew it was on account of race. The world had done its best to drive them into the dirt, so they pretended they didn’t feel it pushing down on their heads every minute of every day. If they ever had come together, just the two of them, it would have been more cathartic and emotional than anything the two of them had ever done (or so Penny had thought, before he learned how Margo got her axes).

There were few things in the world that Margo had allowed herself to love. She had allowed herself to like Quentin, because Eliot had been gone on him from the first meeting, but she’d never expected to love him. It wasn’t quite the same way she loved Eliot, who was the perfect match to everything she’d fought to make herself. Quentin, on the other hand, was much of what she’d given up to become it. He’d been the only person who had ever understood the way and the extent to which she’d loved Fillory, and why Eliot had been worth giving it up. In that period where he was king alongside her, he was _hers._

 

**H. Fogg**

At first, it had been surprising to see Fogg there at the bonfire, before Penny remembered that Fogg had known all of them for longer than they had themselves. Thirty-nine times, he had seen them rise and fall and fail. Fogg’s book was thicker than any of theirs, but it didn’t have to be. Eliza — Jane, whatever — had offered to erase Fogg’s memories in every reset. God knows she’d done it to Mayakovsky. But he’d said no. She offered every single time, and in each one he refused. That contract that Quentin had signed, that had brought him to Brakebills for the last time, was nearly a century’s worth of commitment to making Quentin and his friends the most well-equipped versions of themselves. He’d never had the power to save them, and he still didn’t. But he was proud of them, and he loved them, in his own way. Saying goodbye to Quentin, to his commitment to him, was a final goodbye to forty Quentins and to Jane Chatwin.

 

**E. Waugh**

If Penny were being honest with himself, he’d admit that he thought that the peach was some sort of euphemism or inside joke. A reference to a good moment with Q that would have made them both smile. He’d seen the way that Quentin had reacted, though, and rethought the whole thing.

When he found out what it represented, Penny nearly threw everything within reach into the wall. He spent weeks seething, snapping at everyone, and generally hating himself for becoming a corporate drone to the point that Hades came to lecture him again and Penny screamed himself hoarse. If he’d _known,_  if he’d been allowed to know, he never would have let Quentin pass through. He would have torn up the card, shoved Quentin’s ass back into the elevator, and told him to not come back until he’d had his own version of what Penny had never gotten with Kady.

 _But that was the point,_  Hades said, once Penny had exhausted himself. _Quentin could only be at peace if he knew his own story._

 _They deserved to see each other one more time,_  Penny had wanted to scream. He hadn’t argued when Quentin and Alice had been called star-crossed lovers before, but as soon as he had his voice back, he would tear apart anyone who expressed the thought in his vicinity. He never got the chance, but as soon as Hades had dismissed him, he shelved Quentin M. Coldwater under Heroes with Premature Deaths, with a note that said _See E. Waugh, Star-Crossed Lovers._  No one ever disputed it, not for the billions of years it was there.

 

**J. Wicker**

For as long as Eliot or Fogg had known Quentin, Julia had known him longer. It was one thing to know how a person could grow and change, and another to see their growth as synonymous with yours, to see their life and their being as being the _same._  Julia had trusted Kady to be her heart, her conscience. But she had been prepared to trust Quentin to be her humanity and her love. There were a million little things that no one else could possibly understand about Julia because no one else had _been there._  Losing Q was carving out more of her self than her Shade had ever been. The only person she had ever truly thought she could never live without.

Quentin, in his angrier moments, had accused Julia of being perfect, of being good at anything she set her mind to. Except for card tricks, she would always remind him. Part of that was his physical magic, they later found out, but there had been plenty of times during the quest when he’d been doing tricks absently, as a way to soothe himself, and even with her budding goddess powers, Julia knew she could never.

As much as they were the same, she could never _be_ the same as him. She never thought she’d have to _be_ without him.

Casting the deck of cards towards the fire, she braced herself for the impossible challenge that was going to be living without him. She said goodbye to the gap-toothed boy with peanut butter in his hair and a deck of cards too big for his chubby little hands that had whisked her off to the most beautiful place to ever exist. She said goodbye to the magic she had fallen in love with.

And the cards hovered in midair, reminding her that some things — rather, some _people_ — could never leave you, no matter how hard death may try.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me what you think down below, or come scream and cry with me about Quentin Coldwater and Queliot on [ Tumblr ](http://quentinwiththegoodhair.tumblr.com)


End file.
